The present invention relates to electrical connectors of the type comprising an insulating casing having at least one row of cavities that are intended to accommodate contact terminals inserted from the rear of the casing.
Connectors of this kind are already known, in which the terminals have a window for accommodating a resilient catch made in one wall of the cavities, which catch snaps into the window at the end of the insertion of the terminal.
The locking thus obtained is of the permanent type in that a tool is needed to release the catch from the window. Moreover, it is known to complete this locking, called primary locking, with a secondary locking reinforcing the primary locking in order to increase the retention force of the terminal in the cavity. Such a locking mechanism, suited to terminals of the female-contact type, to be crimped onto a wire, or to insulation displacement connection, is known for example from patents EP 0,310,487 and EP 0,525,171, for which the secondary locking is achieved by a grid which is longitudinally insertable and contains the cavities on the front of the connector.
However, the permanent nature of the primary locking, although completely satisfactory for most applications in the connector field, may be problematic either in the case of connectors for which certain cavities must not accommodate terminals and/or for which a wiring error cannot be corrected without destroying the catch, or in the case where the cost of changing the connector would be greater than the cost of redoing the wiring.
Patent Application FR 2,754,943 describes a connector provided with a primary locking mechanism for the female contacts, for which at least one of the walls of the cavities accommodating the contact terminals has an elongate thin, region separated from the rest of the wall by slots parallel to the direction of insertion of the contacts into the cavities, this thin region being provided with an internal lug to be engaged in a window in a contact terminal.